The Olds Grizzlys are making changes to their coaching staff ahead of the 2024-2025 Alberta Junior Hockey League season.
Josh Erdman, President of the Friends of the Grizzlys Society, says they have announced that Scott Atkinson is stepping down as head coach effective immediately, but will be staying on in an advisory role. He says “Maybe do some skills training. He’s a great mentor. He’s a good man, Scott is a very good man. Sounds like he is going to help us get this thing back on track. I mean Scott is not a spring chicken and it’s a lot of pressure. Success here hasn’t come easy for sure or at all, for that matter. He wants to see this team come around and we’ve had a good conversation with him. We don’t want to see him go completely, we want him to give his input where he can because he is a great mentor and he is a really good man.”
Atkinson was initially hired as the Head Coach and General Manager of the Grizzlys on January 27th of 2020. The lone playoff appearance during his time as bench boss was that season as Olds fell 4 games to 1 to the Drumheller Dragons in a best of seven opening round series.
The highest win total in a season for the Grizzlys with Atkinson as Head Coach was the 2022-2023 campaign when they went 16-39-4-1.
This past season, Olds finished the regular season with a record of 10-41-3-3. The Grizzlys then dropped a best of five play-in series to the Grande Prairie Storm 3 games to 1.
Atkinson’s total regular season record with the Black & Gold wound up being 38-145-21.
The Grizzlys also announced on Thursday, May 30th that assistant coach Kyle Finch will not have his contract renewed. The Grizzlys organization wants to thank Kyle for his contributions and wish him well in his future endeavours. Erdman says “Desiree (Koggel) is going to stick around as our trainer, and Julie (Johnston) will still be in the office, and we’ve got Kevin Watson now as our Business Manager with the actual Olds Grizzlys. Yeah, I think we are making some very major changes and we have to because we’ve tried to do it, you know, softly and tried to do it quickly and we’ve tried every angle. So we are going to try and turn it around and, I mean it’s not going to take a year, it’s going to take more than a year but we’ve got to get something going here.”
The Olds Grizzlys organization points out in a press release that new coaching appointments will be announced in the coming days.